What’s the theory, that obviously jointed contours and asymmetry mimic the imperfections that ink can lay on paper even when the typeface is near-perfect in its symmetry? (Seems like a good-enough reason.)

I’ll revert to my Lamarckian views on letterform recognition for a moment… Have people gotten used to the [accidental, or at least naturally occuring] roughness of letterforms? And could it be that now they accept these types of contours as the norm and crave them?

Hmm, my dictionary says that ‘chunk’ is a ‘thick piece’ or a ‘corpulent animal’. So, I guess ‘chunky’ typefaces are more about weight and proportions, not asymmetry and roughness. Also, I see that most ‘chunky’ faces have wedge serifs.

Personally, I think some of these ‘chunky’ typefaces are too dark. That’s my only complaint about them. Of course, some fonts like digital Electra, are too light. But Avance, on the other hand, it’s too dark (serifs are too big). Smeijers’ typefaces (Quadraat, Renard, Arnhem) are well-balanced, I think (I’ve read books set in Renard and Arnhem FWIW). He usually makes thick stems but the serifs aren’t so big or heavy.

By ‘chunky’, are we meaning that Dwiggins-y thing where what should be a curve becomes a vertex? Like Prensa for example?

This is related to what Hrant has been calling the Fauve style, yes? Derived equally from Dwiggins and Czech modernist faces?

I really like all this stuﬀ — it seems to me to point toward a real possibility for freshness in book setting. I’d like to know more about where it’s coming from, too, and to see some more of these great Czech faces.

(nb this article also references Dwiggins — haven’t had time to read it this morning; maybe some clues here?)

>You may not be aware but there is a very bad American beer (I drank it in my youth) called “Pabst Blue Ribbon”. Your font looks nothing like it, you will be happy to know :-)

Chris — I’m sure Gerald’s comment was not a mere coincidence. Goudy’s Pabst Oldstyle typeface was in fact originally based on lettering that he did for advertisements for the Pabst Brewing Company in the late 1890s or early 1900s. Goudy was later asked to develop a typeface based on this lettering style, which was eventually cut and cast by ATF in 1902.

Funny you should write in, Kent—I almost included Whitman in my list of examples (because, and forgive me if I’m wrong at all, it seems some glyphs have what I at ﬁrst called “chunky” features. I’ll now call them “clunky” [but this is not at all bad, as the dictionary may imply]).

I apologize for using chunky, Eduardo. For me, the word has come to imply more than just thickness and weight; it now alludes to objects that are chunk-like in their appearance (tear oﬀ a chunk of something and look at the break, it’s not clean, but “chunk-like”).

The interior contour of lowercase ‘h’ in Kent Lew’s Whitman is “chunk-like” in its appearance.

I believe that maybe the “clunkiness” you refer to is an attempt to add life to digital type. Some think digital types are overly homogenized and monotonous—especially compared to the subtle varieties in a letterpressed page. Whitman is surprisingly simple (in some ways) and angular at larger sizes, but at text sizes the angles blend with the curves and it becomes a very readable font. This is true of the roman and italic.

I think Scala and Tyfa may fall into this category as well. (was Tyfa ﬁrst designed for letterpress?)

Also, I know I’ve at least read about it on Typophile, the Dwiggins experimental newspaper font (which is mentioned on the Quetzal post and in Mr. Johnson’s Czech link above) does have these qualities. I have a Fine Print issue with a sample, I’ll have to post it when I get a chance. Again, at small sizes, these features become more subliminal, right?

Or Pabst. Pabst is obviously a less serious face, meaning it is for display, where Jenson could be both. But there has been mention of false inking. For me Pabst is somewhat playful on “false inking”, as if Goudy was making fun of bad presswork. Although, as we know it probably has nothing to do with that, Goudy cut it in hot metal. It is merely playful, nothing serious, nothing that would sound the drums from the “inkist camp”. They would blush to use Pabst as an example. After all it makes them look ridiculous.

Also I get confused when anyone speaks of “too bold”, or “too light”. Non of this makes sense unless in context of a speciﬁc use. Some faces simply are light, or are bold. Using the word “too” would have value in historical work, in other words if a face was light and the revival was much darker, you could consider it “too bold”. Otherwise it really does not have “too” much meaning.

This “digital type” theory is old news. Sturdy (as opposed to Chunky”) typefaces such as Scala and Charter were produced in the early days of digital, to deal with the exigencies of the new process, in particular 300 dpi laser printers. Adobe Garamond also addressed the issue.

A similar problem existed in the phototype era: the hairlines of types such as Galliard and ITC Garamond were prone to disappear during the production process.

You can even go back to the early 20th century, and look at the problem printers had with using the same font on both uncoated and coated paper (where ﬁne details were hard to keep right in big print runs) — and the need for convergence in that era produced the uber-chunky Cheltenham.

So, this is an ongoing technical engagement with “druk”.

Digitally, we have been through the rough early days, emerging into digital mastery — with extreme high-res typography (admittedly, planar lithography can never achieve the palpability of letterpress, or the density of toner, but its resolution is superior).

So, I would say that the present vogue for chunky type, if there is such a trend, is a reaction against the recent high-res phenomenon of typographers spec’ing tiny, ultra-light/ultra-ﬁne type on smooth coated stock, a communal indulgence to “push it” to a limit that was previously unattainable.

I didn’t think of types like Charter, and Oranda as well, being built to withstand typical laser printing. But I guess I’m referring to the more crisp, geometric quality some of these types have (I may be missing the point of this thread entirely). Adobe Warnock is another example of what I’m thinking of—sharp angles and points mixed with curves as opposed to a type with no straight lines such as Hoeﬂer Text or your own Walburn. I suppose it may still be just a trend…

Gerald is one of the funniest people around here. I can always depend on him for the days best laugh.

>Maybe in this case it would be “pepperoni breath” and beer. Looks like a sausage label.< I assume Gerald is referring to the meatpacking factories in that part of Wisconsin. The factory workers (meat packers) were the Milwaukee beer maker’s best customers. The Green Bay Packers football team was named in honor of them too. I believe that many more were of German decent than Italian so it was probably “Bratwurst and Beer Breath” after all :-)

>Cheltenham was a “retro-fashion statement”, not a “production solution”.

Cheltenham was too innovative a design to be retro. On reﬂection, perhaps I overstated by saying that the need for convergence (one typeface for many printing situations) produced its design: rather, convergence made it hugely popular, because with its sturdiness it would hold up under abuse, and yet with its precisely drawn features, it had a neatness that worked in many diﬀerent media, and sizes right up to display.

Yes, its chunkyness gave it appeal to the “Arts and Crafts” set, but its appeal was more widespread than that, and in fact it co-existed with the major trend of expressively rendered retro faces of the early 20thC, typiﬁed by Goudy’s work, Kennerley, Garamont, Goudy Old Style, etc.

Ultimately, I agree with you on cognitive dissonance — the best designs are created intuitively, and we seek to rationalize them afterwards. That is the case with Cheltenham, which exists on its own terms.

In this sample, taken from an ad in “New Idea” women’s magazine, September 1905, you can see that display-size Cheltenham has a mechanically drafted precision quite at odds with the Arts & Crafts ideal. At text size, its heft holds up against the rule at right (about 2 pt.).

Yes, its chunkyness gave it appeal to the “Arts and Crafts” set, but its appeal was more widespread than that, and in fact it co-existed with the major trend of expressively rendered retro faces of the early 20thC, typiﬁed by Goudy’s work, Kennerley, Garamont, Goudy Old Style, etc.

I’m going to try to respond to what I think the original point was meant to get at. I think the terms “chunky,” “clunky,” and even Nick’s “sturdy” are misleading. They imply a quality of weight and a stubbiness that, while often present in some of the examples cited, is not necessarily inherent in the kind of unexpected geometry that I think is the primary characteristic.

I think that what A. Scott was referring to is what I have called a “digital vernacular” — a quality of simpliﬁed and often unexpected geometry being applied in otherwise traditional forms. From my perspective this trend traces back through faces like Downer’s Vendetta (1997) and Majoor’s Scala (1991) to van Blokland’s Proforma (1988) and Carter’s Charter (1987) and ultimately to Unger’s Swift (1985). Pre-digital inﬂuences include Dwiggins’s experiments on the one hand and the Czech “school” (Menhart, Preissig foremost, Tyfa also) on the other.

It strikes me that there are two threads of motivation in these precedents — one technical and the other aesthetic. The early digital faces I cited were, as Nick pointed out, to a large extent confronting technical constraints, and their simpliﬁed geometry comes from eﬀorts to create robustness in the face of coarse resolutions, as well as to conserve memory. The character that comes through is inﬂuenced strongly by the problems set before the designers.

The other thread is an aesthetic one. The Czech designers were essentially operating within the general “expressionist” zeitgeist. The willfully coarse ﬁnish of Menhart and Preissig comes from a desire to infuse energy into traditional letterforms while at the same time stripping them of any excess typographic baggage.

Dwiggins, in his own way, was also motivated primarily by aesthetic concerns. His experiments in what he called the “M-formula” were foremost an attempt to infuse a certain “snap” and “action” to the letterforms. His newsface eﬀorts also professed to combat certain optical/technical constraints as well. But I think primarily he was exploring a type aesthetic that was inﬂuenced by his own cultural milieu — Art Deco and Cubism, among others. This aesthetic is seen more overtly in his stencilled ornament and illustration.

Nowadays, the technical constraints facing Unger and Carter are largely overcome (at least in print), and yet Swift and Charter still seem fresh and vital. The continued exploration of this formal territory in contemporary designs seems primarily for aesthetic eﬀect.

Speaking for myself, there is a fascination with taking seemingly inexpressive, reductive elements — straight lines and simple curve segments — and carefully combining them to create an unexpected grace or an organic tension. The yin/yang of the geometric vs. the organic is an ages-old formal dichotomy that can be found interspersed throughout the history of visual culture. The trend that we see in some contemporary type designs is just another expression of that exploration.

I use the term “digital vernacular” because this kind of expression seems to embody an inherently digital aesthetic: there is a sense of “truth to the material” that is appealing. I say “seems to” because strictly speaking, of course, this isn’t true at all — there is nothing about beziers that lends them more to straight lines or simple curves; in fact, the wonderful inventiveness of bezier curves is exactly the opposite, that they can be so complex and supple.

Similarly, there is nothing inherent in the woodcut medium that demands the rough, coarse cuts of the Expressionist work of Kirchner as opposed to the ﬁne detail of engravings by Bewick, for example. And yet the raw woodcuts seem to evince a greater “truth to the material.” [But now, I’ve wandered far aﬁeld.]

I agree (ack) with Gerald G. about Cheltenham being redolent of the arts & crafts aesthetic — not of the Jenson inﬂuence in type, but of the furniture and architecture. The tall, narrow, rectangular look is very much the same.

As to the popularity of Cheltenham, which Hector ﬁnds inexplicable, I think it is due to its ﬁlling a niche. It is narrow, dark, with tall ascenders and chunky, square serifs. This makes it quite readable at medium size in newspaper ads and article headlines.

It does work well in the New York Times as a titling face for articles. Matthew Carter recently tweaked it for the NYT. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the old and new — maybe he ﬁxed some of the awkwardness that Hector objects to. Part of the awkwardness I suspect is in what also makes it work well in some speciﬁc situations: the narrowness, darkness, tall extenders, and chunky serifs.

I think some of the confusion in this thread about ‘chunkiness’ is that both paths — exploration of the angular/geometric and of heavier weights with sturdier serifs — have been pursued in digital type.

I recently used Cheltenham for signage in Eudora Welty’s mother’s garden—at larger sizes I found it quite graceful, especially the italic. I had to noodle with it more in the printed materials—the spacing and leading were tricky. It is quite diﬀerent from anything else I’ve used, it’s kind of a “chubby” type… How’s that?

Further proof of aesthetic features born from technical necessity is Amplitude. The traps aren’t needed, but they’ve become desirable. And Kent, I really am interested by your take on the “truth in materials” because it’s usually associated with an “unﬁnished” quality (coarse cuts in a wood print, visible strokes in a painting, loose lines in a drawing…). I use the word “unﬁnished” for lack of a better word—I would never call a Van Gogh unﬁnished. But could this same quality be applied to type?

I was under the impression that a lot of these newer, sturdier faces were/are a reaction to the anemic digitizing of metal type that used the metal rather than the printed form as the basis for the digital design. These new faces were never metal, so they are designed through-and-through with the ﬁnal product in mind by type designers who want to achieve the sturdier forms of earlier type. For a while, I didn’t like these newer sturdier faces because I held some of the thinner digital versions as the standard of judgement without realizing some of the history. Now I’ve warmed to them completely and lust after beauties like Whitman.

I don’t have any scans of old typesetting to back this up with here, but this is my impression. Am I over-simplifying things with this mindset?

I have admitted that Cheltenham has Arts & Crafts characteristics, in its heft, and perhaps in its proportions (by “tall” I presume you mean a small x-height), but the mechanical qualities of its drafting are at odds with the dominant feature of Arts & Crafts/Revivalist type design of the early 20thC, which is its hand-made quality, which is essentially anti-mass production.

Certainly, there were formal qualities in Arts & Crafts era design in architecture and design (such as simplicity and geometric pattern — eg in Macintosh, Wright), which was proto -Deco, -Modern, and -Moderne, but in graphics, typography and type design the movement was resolutely old-world, and as I said, expressive of the hand in its execution. Again, Goudy’s types, and Benton faces such as his Garamond and Cloister, and Cooper’s Black — these are the deﬁning, most used faces of that era, and they bear no trace of the ruler, set square, or compass: Cheltenham is very diﬀerent from these. And Century.

But enough of Cheltenham. I’d rather discuss the present day. We do tend to lapse into kicking the old chestnuts around, don’t we? In the post where I mentioned Cheltenham, I gave equal space to phototype, but no-one wants to talk about that. ITC Garamond is persona non grata!

Chris, you are right in your observation about “anemic digitizing”, many type designers (including myself) wrestled with this in the early days of digital type. But “anemic phototype” was also a problem — as an art director in the ’70s and ’80s, I found that the funkiness of old metal type and hand-lettering (which I saw in old books and magazines) was something sorely missing in the slick smoothness of commercial typography.

So really, this is an endless phenomenon, the battle of art against commercial slickness — it is what propelled Morris into type design, among others.

Hector, I agree with you that Cheltenham lacks subtlety in execution. This can be a virtue in a typeface: it will accomodate sloppy printing, and will not embarrass typographers who use it without much skill. There are many faces like this.

Personally (with the precedent and advice of Oz), I have designed typefaces that could have been slicker and smoother, but some judicious awkwardness adds character. But no, I don’t like Cheltenham, although I did use it for an ad once, and it worked well.

There has been much a-doe about papers, impression ink and the what-nots that aﬀect design. I suggest that the biggest inputs, (not always positive) in type design is not far from the drawing board. The biggest inﬂuence on type making is the “tools and methods” used by the creator.

Originally type designer, type founder, ink maker, paper maker and printer were one and the same. A most desirable situation

Again, Goudy’s types, and Benton faces such as his Garamond and Cloister, and Cooper’s Black — these are the deﬁning, most used faces of that era, and they bear no trace of the ruler, set square, or compass: Cheltenham is very diﬀerent from these. And Century.

You should look at the typeface with your own eyes, rather than through the lens of monolithic, conventional, histories based on ﬁne books. (With which I am well aware, you don’t have to “educate” me, thank you.) I prefer to look at magazines, by the way.

Matt McGrew suggest that there were many contributors to the Cheltenham design, including Goodhue, Kimball, Benton, and Phinney.

Even if all these were ardent Morrisonians, with every intention of producing an “Arts & Crafts” typeface, does that mean that the ﬁnished product will end up worthy of such a pedigree?

No, with original designs (more so than for revivals/copies), things don’t always turn out as originally intended. One can set out to produce a work that will have a particular appeal, and people will take to it for a quite diﬀerent reason.

Did these folks consider themselves to be part of an Arts & Crafts movement? had the category even been invented? Were they open to other inﬂuences? Of course — yet history distills and simpliﬁes.

Yes, the shift was away from the 19th century modern faces, but these persisted well into the 1920s, and other new (in 1890s) faces such as Century built on that Modern tradition. While a revival of that era, it should be pointed out that Bodoni was not an A&C old style.

Take a look at Cheltenham. It is novel. It has, as you said, the look of having been drawn with an architect’s tools. I agree. And this is my point: it has a structural modernity of ﬁnish quite diﬀerent to the mainstream of “revival era” faces, with their expressive, hand-drawn detailing.

From my study of them, I am fairly sure that Benton and paricularly Phinney did not particularly consider themselves part of the Arts & Crafts movement per se, but they were both responsible for the mainstreaming and commercializing of it, getting it into the mass media of the time.

J.W. Phinney in particular saw something that was clearly prime for mass-market popularity, and was got ATF to be the ﬁrst (AFAIK) big foundry to really jump on what would become the bandwagon, directing knockoﬀs, revivals, and stuﬀ inspired by older models. The part of A&C he saw value in was turning back to historical models for type. The auteur-like private press and careful craftsmanship part of A&C, well, I don’t know if that was such a big concern to him. Perhaps it was just irrelevant, insofar as ATF was solely a retail foundry and not really a printer/publisher (its glorious specimen books notwithstanding). So they just made the type, and what folks did with it was up to them. But certainly supplying people who were part of the A&C movement could have been only a tiny part of ATF’s sales.

BTW, when ATF knocked oﬀ Morris, they didn’t just do a straight knockoﬀ, but “ﬁxed” some of the letters in ways that make me cringe a little. Although the general character is still present, some of the more interesting details have been eliminated. Reminds me a little of ITC’s revivals of the 70s.

Sorry if I’m taking this oﬀ topic. The 1880s-1920s has long been my favorite period in type design.

I was referring to the tall ascenders — the descenders are short. And my name is William, not Gerald or Kent. And you didn’t address the point that Cheltenham looks like other aspects of the arts and crafts movement — mission furniture and architectural decoration.

It doesn’t look like the A&C revivals of old syle types, but this wasn’t the whole movement. Goodhue was an architect, so it is not suprising that the look of the furniture and architectural decoration — which regularly use narrow rectangles with heavy square frames — seem to be more the inspiration.

Take a look at Cheltenham. It is novel. It has, as you said, the look of having been drawn with an architect’s tools. I agree. And this is my point: it has a structural modernity of ﬁnish quite diﬀerent to the mainstream of “revival era” faces, with their expressive, hand-drawn detailing.

Architect like tools are not new to this industry Nick. Remember Tory’s book on letter design.

But chunkiness is certainly indicative of Golden/Jenson. Unless we are not agreeing on what chunkiness is.

Cheltenham has the “look and feel of early “Arts & Crafts Morris/Roycroftonian” book faces. Sorry but it does. I am not calling it a revival of letterforms, but look and feel it has.

Do you see the diﬀerence? Naturally you do, Metropolitan is not chunky. Although still typography, and Bruce Rogers was under the great inspiration of the “Arts & Crafts” movement. In particular, note Rogers’ work with ornamentation.

Take a good look at the two “Revivals”

Now here is the work of Nicolas Jenson. Morris seems to be the reincarnation of Hrant by “adding ink on”

Shown by the ﬁrst dark example of the type face. Scroll downwards to black text.

>Reminds me a little of ITC’s revivals of the 70s.< Do you mean the “X-height uber alis” era? :-)

>I am fairly sure that Benton and paricularly Phinney did not particularly consider themselves part of the Arts & Crafts movement< We humans in retrospect ﬁnd it intelectually stimulating to make arguments about in which categories (of our own deﬁnition) to place historic ﬁgures. I suppose It never mattered much to me in which hole to place a pigeon. We have to remember above all that these were individuals who made wonderful “individual” contributions to their ﬁeld. I can’t imagine them getting together one day and setting up the one and true doctrine to which they all would adhere and calling it their collective movement. We “monday-morning-quarterback” them into tidy groups long after the fact because this is a much enjoyed intelectual pursuit. They probably were a mix of things like we are today. What we now categorize as movements is just our long away perspective reﬂected in our need for ordered discourse. Don’t get me wrong, this thread is a beautiful thing full of great information and a mirror on the nature of humankind. It is also a lot of fun to read so keep up the good work.

J.W. Phinney in particular saw something that was clearly prime for mass-market popularity, and was got ATF to be the ﬁrst (AFAIK) big foundry to really jump on what would become the bandwagon, directing knockoﬀs, revivals, and stuﬀ inspired by older models.”

Bandwagon is the key word. He may not have considered himself part of the “Arts & Crafts” movement, but sorry you are wrong, he was.

Sorry William, no slight intended — I read a whole bunch of posts (Gerald & Kent’s were longest) and didn’t check back when I was writing mine.

>you didn’t address the point that Cheltenham looks like other aspects of the arts and crafts movement — mission furniture and architectural decoration.

Yes I did, but I’ll take another stab at it.

You’re right to say that Cheltenham has something in common with, and may have been inspired, by the crude craftsmanship of A&C furniture. But one also ﬁnds the forms you mention in the engineering and industrial machinery of that era. The G has always struck me as being very nautical, the bottom right feature suggesting a capstan, or the prow of a Dreadnaught.

To me the eﬀect of Cheltenham, and the systematic way it was used in the high tech mass media of the day (see the ad sample in my earlier post), takes it into a completely diﬀerent realm. And this is what Thomas mentioned too, that the A&C forms were exploited and integrated into a non-craftsman milieu. Really, once the face was developed by a team of foundry engineers such as Morris Benton (wearing lab coats, not smocks, I suspect) for mass production, that’s when it stopped being A&C.

BTW, from our Post-modern perspective, it may seem that the A&C movement, preceding 20thC modernism, and harkening back to guild days, was retro. But many aspects of it were forward-looking. Progressive socialism was a feature of the movement. Morris was some kinda feminist, and he and Jane Morris pioneered sensible clothes (especially progressive for women of the time). The holes we put them pigeons in now, are not the same as was around back then.

One sees a similar dichotomy in the origin of the sans, early 19thC — some would say (me) a feature of early industrial modernism, others (Mosley, the Nymph and the grot), a neo-classical phenom. Why not both, or perhaps of some historical signiﬁcance yet to be invented?!

I don’t this this is quite accurate. Some of it was extremely well made, and looks like new a hundred years later. But they do have a heavy, sometimes even crude look to the designs. The heavy, sturdy, square and simple forms seem to derive from an certain aesthetic: they go for it even at the cost of looking clumsy or ungainly. At its best, in the right setting, it really has charm -like Cheltenham?

>takes it into a completely diﬀerent realm

Good point. Like mass produced mission furniture, it is no longer in the retro, personal craft realm, which Morris seems to have had as an ideology, if I get it right. It just takes the aesthetic and goes somewhere else with it. From ideology and innovation to style to fad — how many times has that happened!

>Your objection is that anything old is bad, making it hard for you to reconstruct and review Goodhue’s Cheltenham in a traditional context.

Gerald, that’s not me. I love old stuﬀ. It’s just that I think as much as A&C was traditional, it was also really new, modern, and cutting edge at the time, and that’s the quality of it that interests me most.

It’s also a connection with how this thread started.

Could someone post an image of some new chunky book faces (at work, preferably)?

I realize that many do not understand the “Arts & Crafts Movement”. Some mistaking, obviously, that there was some intended look, rather than, and intended philosophy.

The “Arts & Crafts Movement” seems to lead many into thinking that it is about some French painter sitting by the river in Paris foisting oﬀ his painting of posies so he can wax his moustache and charm some ﬂoosie out of her knickers.

William Morris was an “Art Manufacturer”. This was what the movement was about. It was to improve the state of man, to enrich peoples lives by ornament. To make their homes, their cities, their books, their beds a nicer place for all to live. Never forget that you are speaking of a “Manufacturing Movement”. William Morris was not a tear jerking, poverty ridden painter, living in a hovel with coal miners from Newcastle.

Bless their hearts.

ATF; I am not sure you not aware of all manifestations of that company, all the participants that that company was made up of. It was a conglomerate. Lanston was more precise in its focus. With that in mind I can suggest Linotype was much the same. Lanston was very aware that they were

This sparked his interest in books, and Frederic soon began a new position at the rare book department, of A.C. McClurg. Here he came into contact with some of the ﬁnest editors of the English private presses like Kelmscott, Doves, Erangny and Vale. His passion was born.

Prior to book design, Dwiggins studied art under Frederic W. Goudy at the Frank Holme School in Chicago, then moved to Massachusetts to work with Goudy and his Village Press soon after. During his early career he supplied art to Boston advertisers making use of both his artistic and calligraphic skills. After Goudy’s departure to New York, Dwiggins settled in Hingham for the rest of his life, and also maintained a design studio in Boston for a number of years.

>William Morris was an “Art Manufacturer”. This was what the movement was about. It was to improve the state of man, to enrich peoples lives by ornament. To make their homes, their cities, their books, their beds a nicer place for all to live.

Gerald, That’s not quite right. The main focus was not, as you say, to give consumers more art-full products. With an emergent “Marxist” understanding of the way industrial civilisation works, it addressed the relationship between art, artefacts, and the means of production.

There were no easy answers. For instance, Morris & Co did not use machine printing of wallpaper in their factory for two reasons: because the quality was poor, and because it alienated the workers. Subsequently he allowed machine printing of some patterns, to produce aﬀordable versions of his designs for the lower classes.

At Roycroft, a hard core commune stuck to its guns. They were the ones who were surrounded.

The broad ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement inﬂuenced the socialist structure of the modern state, especially in Northern Europe. But so did the altruism of enlightened industrialists from Wedgwood on.

Nothing is neat and tidy, everything overlaps.

Now, how about some samples of contemporary chunky book faces, please?!

Morris & Co did not use machine printing of wallpaper in their factory for two reasons: because the quality was poor, and because it alienated the workers. Subsequently he allowed machine printing of some patterns, to produce aﬀordable versions of his designs for the lower classes.

You must be a member of the “Fabian Society”.

This imaginary contradiction proves my point about “Art Manufacturing”.

Roycrofters books used more paper than their communal paper making department was able to produce. But that’s not what they said in their advertising literature. You could call it, “Marketing the Arts”. Know anything about Dard Hunter? That’s one of the reasons he left.

Anyway, as I have shown, there is nothing contemporary about chunky book faces.